No Coal News for a while since I've been on a short vacation.  It's been a fun week driving through Colorado visiting sites such as Pike's Peak, the Rocky Mountain National Park, and the more-fun-than-you'd-think Olathe Sweet Corn Festival.  I tried to go to visit several Colorado Oil Shale Projects - but due to the trade secrecy surrounding these pilot endeavors, I was politely declined a tour.

Olathe is a mostly agricultural community in far Western Colorado, about 40 miles from the Utah border (By the way, my prayers go out to the six coal miners presently trapped in a Utah mine, and to all the victims of coal mine accidents in America, China and worldwide). 

From a combination of it's special conditions; a high-altitude valley plain (over a mile above sea level), very hot days, very cool nights and a special hybrid of white-and-yellow sweet corn developed by Dave Galinat in the late 70's - they produce what, in the ChinaCoalWatcher's professional and highly-experienced corn-eating opinion, is the world's best, sweetest, most tender and fastest-cooking corn.  I even purchased 2.5 bushels to take home which is 100 ears to you city-folk.  Yes, it's that good.

I purchased the corn in ice-filled boxes from a stand run by the Tuxedo Corn Company (the main producer of the Olathe Sweet Variety) for $20, which is about twice bulk wholesale price so a decent deal especially since I got a nice young man to load them up for me.  Still, he told me its double what they were charging just a few years ago. 

He said that the government-mandated demand for corn-based ethanol was so high that despite record-plantings many sweet-corn farmers were switching to varieties more profitably produced for industrial distillers.  That means less sweet-corn to go around and so the scarcity of their quality crop also commanded higher prices.  John Harold, former Olathe Mayor, and owner of Tuxedo Corn, also has some interesting and insightful things to say on video about the corn and the nation's present problematic and controversial immigration system and agricultural labor supply situation.  He makes a compelling case the way a farmer would, concise yet complete.

A lot of people are enthusiastic about the potential of biofuels in general and Corn-based-ethanol in particular, but this excitement is mostly based on ignorance.  Once the analysis is done, the results are less than impressive. 

Producing ethanol from corn is costly, clogs up rail networks, uses enormous amounts of fossil fuels and is still a net emissions source of CO2 since large quantites of coal are used to power the fractional distillers.  It delivers extra profits to corn farmers, but creates additional expenses for corn-consuming farms, like dairies or livestock feed lots.  It's even apprently making prime steak more expensive and harder to find.  Earlier Today the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) hosted a show about the extreme inflationary pressures brougth about by market-manipulating biofuel policies, and especially the consequences in China.

From Radio Australia:

... Last month, Beijing banned the use of food crops in the production of the biofuel ethanol — after the cost of the staple meat PORK rose 43 per cent in the space of a year. Worldwide, the International Monetary Fund says food prices have risen by 23 per cent in the past eighteen months, partly due to the soaring demand for corn to make fuel. It's become a real source of concern to emergency food agencies like the World Food Program and the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation.

... The World Food Program has warned the rising cost of food means it can't afford to feed the 90-million people who rely on food aid every year. The FAO's Gustavo Best says too many farmers are switching to producing biofuels, there's too little national or international regulation of the industry — and, he says — it's now becoming a threat to food security.